Malaria importation from Kenya could be reduced substantially (34%) by eliminating inappropriate medical advice.

Timely intervention for diabetic retinopathy (DR) lessens the possibility of blindness and can save considerable costs to health systems. To ensure that interventions are timely and effective requires methods of screening and monitoring pathological changes, including assessing outcomes. Fractal analysis, one method that has been studied for assessing DR, is potentially relevant in today's world of telemedicine because it provides objective indices from digital images of complex patterns such as are seen in retinal vasculature, which is affected in DR. We introduce here a protocol to distinguish between nonproliferative (NPDR) and proliferative (PDR) changes in retinal vasculature using a fractal analysis method known as local connected dimension (D conn ) analysis. The major fi nding is that compared to other fractal analysis methods, D conn analysis better differentiates NPDR from PDR (p = 0.05). In addition, we are the fi rst to show that fractal analysis can be used to differentiate between NPDR and PDR using automated vessel identifi cation. Overall, our results suggest this protocol can complement existing methods by including an automated and objective measure obtainable at a lower level of expertise that experts can then use in screening for and monitoring DR.

This paper discusses applying the social behaviour of bees to the web search. We proposed an on-line search of the user's predefined group of pages. In particular, this approach is based on our model of a bee hive being augmented by a model of the behaviour of bees outside the hive and by the method of assigning the page quality. With regard to the advantages of this approach, the hive as a whole seems to be able to determine the best routes of the search and reject the bad ones. This has been indicated by our first exploration tests as we report in the paper. However, a comprehensive experimentation is necessary before definitive conclusions can be made.

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